Entertainer and Artist
Ice Station Zebra. By Alistair Maclean. (Collins, 16s.) Go Tell it on the Mountain. By James Baldwin. (Michael Joseph, 21s.) Giovanni's Room. By James Baldwin. (Michael Joseph, 21s.) .
IN the very early days of long-play, there was an American record entitled 'Classical Music— For 1 hose Who Don't Like Classical Music: i have often felt that this formula could be use- fully applied to other human activities. All over London today, for instance, there is new archi- tecture for those who don't like architecture. What have the most celebrated figures of the moment been engaged in, if not love for those who don't like love'? But above all, books for people who don't like books are always with us, and they are usually near the top of the best- seller lists.
- A leading .writer in this branch of literature is Alistair Maclean. Ice Station Zebra concerns the voyage of an American atomic submarine under the North Polar Ice Cap, to surface near a burnt-out weather station; on board is Dr. Carpenter, investigating a possible case of espionage and multiple murder. Like many suc- cessful writers for those who don't like writers, Mr. Maclean includes a large amount of techni- cal detail, still Top Secret, of course, and there- fore extremely vague. He adds a lot of weather, though he has little, ability to evoke the feeling of cold, and hardly any characterisation at all. I recommend the very first paragraph of Ice Station Zebra to English teachers who like to keep a morgue of really bad English prose. An example: 'They were the coolest, clearest grey eyes I'd ever seen, eyes that he used as a dentist might his probe, a surgeon his lancet or a scientist his electronic microscope. Measuring eyes. Please, Mr. Maclean, since when has a sur- geon used his lancet or a dentist his probe for measuring? But, no doubt about it, once the US Submarine Dolphin is under way, Mr. Maclean drags you along over all the bumps of his appalling style. I found reading his book gave rise to confusing guilt sensations, like going to the cinema on the only line afternoon of the year. he Station Zebra is the Book Society's current choice. Perhaps they also don't like books, either.
It is a long way from the Ice Cap to the tropi- cal rain forest of Who Are You? Lawrence Durrell, the blurb tells us, has compared Anna
Kavan to Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes; this fact may otter rather less encouragement than was intended. Here is the old situation of schoolgirl wife, brutal, drunken husband and shy lover, under monsoon conditions, with a few extra decorations, including a metaphysical bird which shouts 'Who are you?' This slim volume seems overwritten in a Conradian sort of way, and slightly absurd. One of the really dreadful things we learn about the husband is that he is covered with hair How can one persuade Miss Kavan that this common physical characteristic is no more evidence of moral turpitude than a black or a yellow skin'! Besides, Miss Kavan, some girls like it.
Nobody could usefully compare Miss Kavan with Mr. Maclean. They show the defects of the two opposing roles of artist-writer and pro- fessional entertainer. The two Mr. Baldwins have more in common. They share an intensity and seriousness of purpose, and the slight monotony of tone that goes with this. Michael Baldwin's narrator, Bertram Swale, a journalist of in- credible disgruntlement, tells the story of the 'Miraclejack. Sym, a strange character who climbs such landmarks as the Vickers building and Battersea Power Station almost miraculously. Or perhaps miraculously? .1 he weather is con- sistently awful, the crowds invariably violent and sadistic, everyone behaves as with doomed com- pulsion. Are we in the world of allegory? It is difficult to tell, these days. Our Mr. Baldwin, who is also a poet, seems worth watching. He has imaginative power, but in this book his in- tentions are vitiated by a style that is peculiarly unattractive. He has succumbed to the fallacy of imitative form: there was no need for such a graceless character as Swale to express himself so gracelessly.
Approaching the American Mr. Baldwin, one feels the significant slight explosion -in the ears: a completely different altitude has been reached. These reprints of his two early novels remind us that he is not just another writer given over to his obsessions, however important these may be. He can be admirably objective, as in the scenes with the pathetic plain American girl, Sue, in Giovanni's Room. Go Tell it on the Mountain soon moves away from the boy John Grimes, whose father is preacher at the Temple of Fire Baptised, to deal with the other members of his family. Apart from the religious scenes, which deal with trance states and cataleptic fits, this book is true about any oppressed race living in poverty. But the various American versions of nonconformism are difficult to appreciate or even take seriously. It has not occurred, I think, to enough people that in countries of mixed race but a single religion (Morocco. Brazil) colour problems are far less acute.
Someone once remarked that the Authorised Version had been a disastrous influence on English prose. Mr. Baldwin disproves this; his style, curiously free from any form of Ameri- canism, never sounds like a pastiche, even when the Biblical rhythms are strongest. In dialogue he is sometimes less successful. Giovanni, in the second novel, never sounds remotely like an Italian barman speaking French. He is really a hit operatic, a mixture of Mimi and Madame Butterfly, and in this novel the picture of Paris homosexual life is limited to the two bars the tourists go to. But nothing Mr. Baldwin writes is without a high quality of perception. Before re- reading these works I had thought of him as rather like George Orwell: an unwilling novelist who had finally found his true range in polemic. Now I am not so sure.
FRANK TUOHY
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